DNA shaking up child-support rights

June 30, 2002|By Nicholas Riccardi. Special to the Tribune. Nicholas Riccardi is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune newspaper.

Advances in DNA testing have liberated convicts from Death Row and helped clear up scores of unsolved mysteries, but they have been slower to release men from obligations to pay child support in cases where the tests show they are not the biological father.

Instead of resolving some of those cases, DNA has plunged the area of child support and paternal obligation into complicated new debate over the law and issues as profound as what it means to be a father.

Bert Riddick's three children cram into one room in his brother-in-law's house in Carson because Riddick is required by a court order to pay child support for a girl he has never met and who is not his own. The result is that Riddick cannot afford to provide for his biological children. A similar order sent Dennis Caron to an Ohio jail for 30 days because he refused to pay child support for a boy who DNA tests showed was not his.

And in the case of Carnell Smith of Decatur, Ga., a $120,000 child-support bill for an ex-girlfriend's offspring who did not belong to him caused Smith to double-check the paternity of his wife's new baby with another DNA test.

"Ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent mine," Smith said proudly.

The three men share more than a legal dilemma. They belong to a loose-knit movement of fathers who are gradually reshaping child-support laws in state after state so that men who can prove they did not father children can avoid paying for them.

In doing so, they have raised new issues about the legal system's role in defining the rights and responsibilities of those men who are deemed fathers by the courts, only to have those rulings later challenged by new scientific evidence.

Illinois House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie (D-Chicago) said she is not aware of any state legislation pending on the issue. She is not a fan of the current debate, arguing that fatherhood is about more than just chromosomes.

"The argument would be, here is someone who behaved like a father and later found out that, in reality, he is not. But that does not cut the bond that had developed between the father and the child," she said.

Gemma B. Allen, partner in the Chicago firm Ladden & Allen and a family law attorney for more than 20 years, said current Illinois law is ahead of the curve nationally. In Illinois, fathers can petition for release from child support if a DNA test rules them out as the father and if they file within the two-year statute of limitations. She said the issue is "a brewing volcano."

Science outpaces the law

"It's become a very hot issue in some other states without consideration, ultimately, to the children of America," she said. "There are some organizations and some people that foment divisiveness. It's sad that this is probably another issue which will be used to antagonize the sexes against each other."

"It's one of those things where the science has given us the ability to do something we maybe shouldn't do," said Paula Roberts of the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington.

"What you're saying is that all a man is, in terms of a father to a child, is a sperm donor. . . . We think that's really bad social policy."

The dilemma is created by legal tradition that holds that once a court has ruled that a man is the father of the child, the judgment must stand. If the man does not protest quickly enough, his only recourse is to pay support until the child turns 18.

The number of men affected could be large, especially because child-support orders often are entered without the man appearing in court.

California Assemblyman Roderick Wright (D-Los Angeles), author of a paternity-reform bill, cites statistics from a 1999 study by the American Association of Blood Banks. That study found that of 280,000 blood tests performed to determine the paternity of children, 30 percent excluded the subject tested as being the father.

"It ain't his baby and we know it ain't his baby and here we're hitting him for 60 percent of his salary," Wright said. "In any other area of law, if that happened, that would be fraud. We'd be going out and screaming bloody murder."

In some cases, courts can order children to submit blood or tissue samples for DNA testing, but rules regarding when and how those tests may be used vary from state to state.

"This is a clash between jurisprudence concepts rooted in English common law of a judgment being inviolate, versus 21st Century science that has shown, well, sometimes we were wrong," said Steven Eldred, a deputy district attorney in Fresno County's child-support office. "This is a hot issue. Every state is going to have to deal with this."

In Ohio, a child-support reform bill passed its legislature two years ago with only one dissenting vote.

"People just said, `Hey, gee, this is common sense,'" said Caron, a 45-year-old corporate recruiter who lives outside of Columbus and lobbied for the bill. "Why should some guy get the shaft like this when he isn't the father?"